Jeff Brown on how he found success opening groceries in Philadelphia food deserts

Jeff Brown, owner of 12 supermarkets in Philadelphia, such as ShopRite and Fresh Grocer, speaks to The Philadelphia Citizen co-founder Larry Platt during a virtual town hall.

Historically speaking, most grocery stores fail in food deserts, the kinds of impoverished communities where Brown’s stores are typically located. So how did Brown overcome that pattern?

“This is something that I worked on a lot with [the late Citizen chairman] Jeremy Nowak. We knew that almost all supermarkets went out of business in food deserts…and there had to be a financial reason for that, a business model reason,” Brown shared. He and Nowak figured out that there’s about a five percent financial gap in serving the poor versus serving a middle-income community.

“Once we realized that this isn’t a racism issue, this is a finance issue and it needs to be solved with a finance solution, that’s when Jeremy and I got to work on the Fresh Food Financing Initiative to develop public/private partnerships to mitigate some of that gap.”

The far more interesting part of the solution, he said, is about just being a good entrepreneur. “It doesn’t really matter someone’s race, it doesn’t matter what income they have; you’re there to solve problems, you’re there to serve,” he said.

Видео Jeff Brown on how he found success opening groceries in Philadelphia food deserts канала The Philadelphia Citizen